Disembodied Intimacy

2020/21 Nasher Prize Dialogues | Digitally Communicating Art, Caregiving, and Sex

Gathered in October 2020 during a time of isolation around the world, Hauser & Wirth’s Director of Special Projects, Randy Kennedy, moderates presentations by artists Emmanuel Van Der Auwera, Mika Rottenberg, and Jacolby Satterwhite, as well as design critic Alice Rawsthorn. "Disembodied Intimacy: Digitally Communicating Art, Caregiving, and Sex" considered the ways digital technology can enrich or stymie important physical human acts, from the presentation of art to nurturing the sick to the erotic. With a focus on the body, the talk seeks to underscore the physical, phenomenological relationship between people and things so fundamental to the experience of sculpture.

Watch the Event

Moderator / Randy Kennedy, Hauer & Wirth's Director of Special Projects
Randy Kennedy is a writer, editor and curator. His first novel, Presidio, about a wandering car thief in West Texas, was published in 2018 by Simon & Schuster. For 25 years, he was a reporter for The New York Times, more than half of that time writing about the art world. He is now editor in chief of the art magazine Ursula, published by the gallery Hauser & Wirth, and he serves as the gallery's Director of Special Projects. He is at work on a new novel set in the 1960s in a mental hospital in the Sacramento Valley.

Panelists

Alice Rawsthorn is an award-winning design critic and the author of critically acclaimed books on design, including Hello World: Where Design Meets Life and, most recently, Design as an Attitude. Alice is a co-founder, with Paola Antonelli, of the Design Emergency project to investigate design's response to the Covid-19 crisis and its aftermath. An influential public speaker and social media commentator on design, Alice has participated in important global events including TED and the annual meetings of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Based in London, she is chair of the boards of trustees at Chisenhale Gallery in London and The Hepworth Wakefield art gallery in Yorkshire. Alice was awarded an OBE for services to design and the arts.

Mika Rottenberg is an Argentina-born, New York-based artist devoted to a rigorous practice that combines film, architectural installation, and sculpture to explore ideas of labor and the production of value in our contemporary hyper-capitalist world. Born in Buenos Aires in 1976, Rottenberg spent her formative years in Israel then moved to the US where she earned her BA from the School of Visual Arts in New York and followed this with an MFA at Columbia in 2004. She has had solo museum exhibitions at the MCA Chicago; New Museum, New York; and MAMbo, Bologna, Italy. Rottenberg was the recipient of the 2019 Kurt Schwitters Prize, which recognizes artists who have made a significant contribution to the field of contemporary art. In 2018, she was the winner of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s James Dicke Contemporary Artist Prize, which recognizes an artist younger than 50 who has produced a significant body of work and consistently demonstrates exceptional creativity.

Jacolby Satterwhite is celebrated for a conceptual practice addressing crucial themes of labor, consumption, carnality and fantasy through immersive installation, virtual reality and digital media. He uses a range of software to produce intricately detailed animations and live action film of real and imagined worlds populated by the avatars of artists and friends. Satterwhite was born in 1986 in Columbia, South Carolina. He received his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Arts, Baltimore and his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Satterwhite’s work has been presented in numerous exhibitions both in the United States and in Europe, including most recently at Fabric Workshop & Museum, Philadelphia (2019); Pioneer Works, New York (2019); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2019); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2019); the Minneapolis Institute of Art (2019); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2018); Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2018); New Museum, New York (2017); Public Art Fund, New York (2017); San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco (2017); and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2017). He was awarded the United States Artist Francie Bishop Good & David Horvitz Fellowship in 2016. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. In 2019, Satterwhite collaborated with Solange Knowles on her visual album, “When I Get Home." 

Emmanuelle Van der Auwera sets up encounters with found images that provoke a questioning of our visual literacy: How do images of contemporary mass media operate on various publics and to what end? With the formal rigor of a logician, the artist dissects how images are engineered, mastering specialized industry techniques and intervening on their protocol. In so doing, Van der Auwera brings us no closer to a monolithic truth, but constructs new paradigms for reading images and understanding our relationships with them. Emmanuelle Van der Auwera was born in 1982 in Belgium lives and works in Brussels. He was a 2015 Laureate of the Higher Institute for Fine Arts (HISK) post-academic course in Ghent, a 2015 Langui Award recipient of the Young Belgian Art Prize, and the first winner of the Goldwasserschenking awarded by WIELS and the Belgian Royal Museums of Fine Art. His work has recently been featured in exhibitions at WIELS (Brussels, BE), Centre Pompidou (Paris, FR), Palais de Tokyo (Paris, FR), Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci (Prato, IT), Ars Electronica (Linz, AT), Casino Luxembourg - Forum d'art Contemporain (Luxembourg City, LU), Mu.ZEE (Ostend, BE), Botanique (Brussels, BE), among others. His work has been acquired by the Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas, TX, US), KANAL - Centre  Pompidou (Brussels, BE), Mu.ZEE (Ostend, BE), Fundación Otazu (Pamplona, ES), Collection de la Province de Hainaut - BPS22 (Charleroi, BE), the National Bank of Belgium - IACCCA (Brussels, BE), and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (Eugene, OR, US).


About Nasher Prize Dialogues

The discussion is part of Nasher Prize Dialogues, the discursive platform of the Nasher Prize, the annual international prize for a living artist in recognition of a body of work that has had an extraordinary impact on the understanding of sculpture. The Dialogues are intended to foster international awareness of sculpture and to stimulate discussion and debate. Programs—including panel discussions, lectures, and symposia—are held in cities around the world on a yearly basis, offering engagement with various audiences, and providing myriad perspectives and insight into the ever-expanding field of sculpture. 

Previous international Nasher Prize Dialogues programs include Artists and Authorship in partnership with The Common Guild, Glasgow in association with Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art 2018; The Public Place of Sculpture at Museo Jumex, Mexico City; The Work of Sculpture in the Age of Digital Production at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin; and Why Sculpture Now? at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in partnership with the Henry Moore Foundation.

Sponsors

Hartland and Mackie Family; Janelle and Alden Pinnell/The Pinnell Foundation; and Christen and Derek Wilson are the Dialogues Sponsors of the Nasher Prize.

Presented in partnership with Hauser & Wirth gallery and Ursula magazine.

Nasher Sculpture Center
2001 Flora Street
Dallas, Texas 75201
214.242.5100
Stay Connected